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President Obama nominates Tom Perez for Labor

President Barack Obama called Tom Perez a man “who reminds us of this country’s promise” as he nominated him to be his next labor secretary Monday.

Perez, 51, is the assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. If confirmed by the Senate, he would replace Hilda Solis, who resigned in January. The son of Dominican immigrants, Perez worked his way through college and law school, Obama said, before working for the Justice department and becoming Maryland’s state labor secretary.

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Perez remarks after being nominated

”His story reminds us of this country’s promise, that if you’re willing to work hard, it doesn’t matter who you are or where you come from, what your last name is, you can make it if you try,” Obama said. “Tom’s made protecting that promise for everybody the cause of his life.”

Perez thanked Obama in both English and Spanish.

“Over my career, I’ve learned that true progress is possible if you keep an open mind, listen to all sides and focus on results,” he said.

Neither Obama nor Perez touched the issue of how immigration reform will deal with undocumented workers, which immediately prompted Republican resistance to the nomination.

Even before Obama formally announced Perez, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, blasted the appointment as “an unfortunate and needlessly divisive nomination.”

“The top priority of the secretary of Labor should be to create jobs and higher wages for American workers,” Sessions said, citing Perez’s past work for the advocacy group Casa de Maryland. “But Mr. Perez has aggressively sought ways to allow the hiring of more illegal workers.”

And Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) said he will block the Perez nomination because the Justice Department never responded to a 2011 letter he wrote with questions about federal enforcement of the 1993 Motor Voter Act.

“Perez was greatly involved in the DOJ’s partisan full court press to pressure Louisiana’s secretary of state to only enforce one side of the law — the side that specifically benefits the politics of the president and his administration at the expense of identity security of each and every Louisianian on the voter rolls,” Vitter said Monday.

But organized labor groups praised the pick.

“At a time when our politics tilts so heavily toward corporations and the very wealthy, our country needs leaders like Tom Perez to champion the cause of ordinary working people,” said AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka. “And working families need and deserve a strong advocate as their Secretary of Labor — one who will vigorously enforce job safety standards, wage laws, and anti-discrimination rules, and who will speak out forcefully for working families and their workplace rights, including their right to join together to improve their lives and working conditions.

The White House portrays Perez as someone in line with Obama’s sense of social justice. An official lauded Perez for settling the nation’s three largest fair-lending housing cases, boosting enforcement of human trafficking laws and protecting rights of veterans and students. He also led the Justice Department in challenging voter ID laws in Texas and South Carolina.

Perez’s nomination came just hours after the release of the Republican National Committee’s report assessing what went wrong during the 2012 campaign, including problems appealing to Latinos and dealing with the issue of comprehensive immigration reform, which RNC chairman Reince Priebus said the GOP must back to survive politically.

Perez’s confirmation hearings are expected to feature more questions about a scathing inspector general’s report released last week that revealed internal racial hostilities in the Civil Rights Division and found Perez gave misleading public testimony when he said in 2010 that political appointees did not make the decisions to drop prosecution of New Black Panther Party members.